For the better part of a year now, I’ve lived on the ground floor of an apartment complex. My room faces out onto the street, and there’s a small ditch between my window and the tall black fence that borders the sidewalk. I hate it here.
The facilities are fine, any troubles regarding quality of life are purely my own fault. Letting mold build up in the corners of my shower, never sweeping my floors, being generally untidy, etcetera. These things are amplified by the fact that my home is a glorified en suite with a tiny connected kitchen. Essentially, small problems made large by small living. Still, I count myself lucky to have the place. Or, I did.
But these are not the main source of my discomfort. It’s the location. I live in a bad part of town. Junkies in filthy tracksuits and skeletal faces litter the streets, begging you to fund their next high. Every man, woman and child is a hostile creature, and I’ve stopped trying to differentiate whether the festering pavement shit belongs to man or dog. Every morning spent walking to work, I’m consistently greeted by jeering gangs of unruly kids who would be nothing more than a nuisance if the police got off their swollen asses and actually did their job. Strung out freaks act like rabid animals, although they very well may have rabies. And men not dissimilar to myself in terms of living conditions and economic standing readily hand out aggressive, dirty glares the moment you cross their preordained walking trajectories. While many of these people are more like me than unalike, I still can’t help but despise them with every fiber of my being. But make no mistake, I wouldn’t expect or want them to feel any different about me.
So after all this, I trudge home after a long day at my dead end job, encountering all the same but worse in the early evening, and want nothing more than to lay in bed. Skip dinner, skip television or anything like that, just sleep. I’m a morning person, and the one fleeting ounce of positivity I manage to scrape by comes from getting up early, having a slow breakfast and reading the paper. That’s it, and as I sip my dirt flavored coffee and stab at bland scrambled eggs with a fork that should have been cleaned after its last use, I get to watch the beautiful and benevolent sun stream into my kitchen. It stirs something in my soul, fills me with hope that there’s a better day than the last waiting for me. Most days when this happens, I feel a lump in my throat. Other days, the floodgates just open wide and I can’t stop crying. And it’s the only thing in my gray little life that has any color, any meaning.
So when something began disturbing my sleep schedule, I was naturally upset. The problem began last Monday. As per usual, I trudged through my miserable routine, dragged myself home and fell into my soft, clean bed. As I began to drift into a better place, I heard it. The scratching at my street level window. It started light and infrequent. I genuinely thought something was simply caught on the outside fence, gently brushing up against the glass. However, the next night was different. It was rhythmic, louder and deeper. As if something was being intentionally dragged back and forth across my window. I tried to cancel it out it, I tried and tried, but the more I seemed to focus on ignoring it, the more the noise chiseled its way into my mind, robbing me of precious rest. I woke up in the morning for the first time in months having missed that golden window of sunlight streaming into my kitchen. I was infuriated. I resolved that if it were to happen again, I would rip my curtains back and confront whatever annoying brat thought he could ruin my sleep for some cheap trick. So when it began happening yet again on Wednesday night, and I tore the covers away from my lanky frame, stomped my feet across the floor and swiped at my window coverings, I could barely stifle a scream as I stumbled backwards to fall on my bed.
There in the darkness, nearly pressing against my window, were two bulbous, lidless eyes staring back at me with an animal focus that I can only describe as malevolent. Those eyes bore into my skull and refused to blink, as its more obscure appendage kept scraping away at my window with greater intensity. I froze on my bed, mouth agape and eyes almost as wide as the creature’s in mortified disbelief. Snapping out of it, I sprung up to close the curtains, filled with the adrenaline of a boy sprinting to his room after shutting off the house lights. So vulnerable in a race against time, with every moment spent exposed imposing upon me some vague, horrible sense of impending danger. Like a rabbit bolting towards its burrow, except I had to move closer to this horror to be freed from its inhuman glare. Ultimately, I could not. Every nerve, every joint, every muscle screamed at me to move back from the window, animal survival instinct warning me away from a predator. So I turned and fled, stumbling an agonizingly long few steps from the exposed window towards my bathroom, where I locked myself inside and lay on the cold tile floor. There was not a wink of sleep that night. Every moment my eyes were shut was a moment reliving my stare-down with those huge, hungry eyes.
Morning came, and I forced myself to stand from the corner I had balled myself into, unlatched the door, and stepped back into my room. I was not ready for what I saw. The window was broken in, glass sparkling across the hardwood floor to reveal my room upturned. I must not have heard the invasion in my terrified delirium, or I must have dozed off at some point. But that was not the worst of it. The worst part was the sun. Those great golden rays which I once loved were now streaming into my newly violated room. The thing that once gave my life purpose could at that moment only be associated with life threatening violation. I could not spend another moment in that flat. It was no longer a place of safety or rest. It was no longer my home.
Without getting changed, eating, or washing up, I went to work, having nowhere else to go. My manager must have been able to tell I had hardly slept, because the instant he saw me, he noted how I looked like a zombie, and soon after berated me for coming into work too exhausted to function after he saw me struggling to open a cash register. I hardly listened. Now this hated place of monotony somehow had more positive associations than my own apartment. I felt dead. Luckily, I was not completely alone. A coworker saw my state of being along with the encounter with our boss, and asked what happened. All I said was that my home was broken into the night before. What else could I say? I didn’t want to relive the memory more than I had to. He asked if I wanted to go to his place after work to have dinner with him and his girlfriend, and even offered me a place to sleep if I truly didn’t feel safe at home for the time being. Of course I agreed, and Thursday night came and went without incident.
Today is Friday. I’ll make excuses, ask politely, even beg to stay here as long as I possibly can. I’d rather sleep in a homeless shelter before I go back to my apartment. My small, street level apartment. Whatever that thing is, it knows where I live. And next time it comes to my window, I’m not sure if it’ll wait for me to greet it before it invites itself in.